We’re Fighting For Freedom

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 19th, 2010


Observations:


1) If what we’re witnessing is the high water mark of conservative excitement and energy this seems like a focus group upon the untenable. Mitt Romney is not fighting for freedom, he is an omnipotent pandering machine. The fact that he has not grown out of those awful out of touch jokes he told - Obama overtakes Lindsay Vonn on the Downhill -or- whos to blame? pin the tail on the donkey - is more news than anything. That’s their guy. He has no newness to his game.


Mitt Romney is not fighting for freedom, and the fact that he is at a conference where Grover Norquist is the voice of reason, but he is playing to the other side says everything that was wrong in 2007 and 2008 when he was losing the first time. Mitt Romney is fighting for corporate enrichment and interest.


Marco Rubio is not fighting for freedom. He is fighting for half of freedom. The half that plays well in this election, deficits and taxes. There is less freedom in a sunk economy with higher interest rates, a return of foreclosures, and runs on banks, and last year proved it, and the guys in his own party that he’s meant to replace caused it. Do you know why Marco Rubio exists? To put a fresh face on the same old half truths, and because the guys who used to represent those ideas from the conservative side of the aisle grew out of them in the face of reality.


Dick Cheney is not fighting for freedom. Dick Cheney calls freedom the Patriot Act. Dick Cheney thinks deficits are irrelevant. Dick Cheney is a photo opportunity for the hypocrisy present at the APAC meeting when they cheer the guy they sent home last year. It made no sense, Joe Scarborough amongst others was visibly embarrassed at an obvious groupthink error, and the opening in all of this was captured in real time on Morning Joe today by John Meacham:


“Strategic issues confounded by a tactical mentality”


Bingo.


2) Joe Scarborough went a step further and exponentially added to the damage by making the same mistake in his oversight of the issue. He tried to say “As a drill, I’m not going to talk about anything else besides entitlements”. Look, that’s a good conversation to have friend, but that’s exactly it: you cannot have any single conversation in the face of today's catacomb of pressing issues because they are all interrelated. In fact, its not the algebra of deficits versus jobs, it’s the integral of that and entitlements and a continuing fragility in the banking system and the inverse of entitlements where 60 million people become income-less, health care less-wards of the underfunded state.


When you walk into that trap of your own doing, you actually provide a modicum of sympathy for the President. The President doesn’t want entitlement bankruptcy. The President wants the surplus from his party’s last period of executive branch ownership. The goals are mutual, but preaching algebra is a causal effect of the wildly swinging electorate, and the recipe for that meeting where people all dress the same and smile and shake hands but couldn’t put their belief system into the context of a polynomial if their life depended on it. You and Mitt don’t help with algebraic logic, as it is the marketing of denial.


3) My most optimistic moment was when the panel went around the table and all voted that the goose was cooked for the Democratic party in 2010. That is what cable news does best. Prognosticate badly.


Check your sources people. Some guy was running around a convention center and it was televised. He was what’s wrong with the Republican party and proof that its freedom fighting offshoot is still in it’s infancy. Who was that guy?


Well if I gave you a clue: had orange skin, Pat Riley hair, looks like Freddy on iCarly, seems like a Bond villain, maybe you could pick him out.


He was everyone.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.